A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 4

of
the hearth, and so understood what the Fathers did to the
children they took.
    Visto remembered his first sight of Forest Stet, a range of
denuded hills filled with torn-up stumps and roots, reminding
him of one of the bone-yards that ringed the city that
had been his home, left after the last of the livestock had
been slaughtered. And at that moment, looking upon what
had once been a forest, Visto had realized that the entire
world was now dead. There was nothing left and nowhere
to go.
    Yet onward he trudged, now just one among what must
be tens of thousands, maybe even more, a road of children
leagues long. And for all that died along the way, others
arrived to take their place. He had not imagined that so
many children existed. They were like a great herd, the last
great herd, the sole source of food and nourishment for the
world's last, desperate hunters.
    Visto was fourteen years old. He had not yet begun his
growth-spurt and now never would. His belly was round
and rock hard, protruding so that his spine curved deep
just above his hips. He walked like a pregnant woman,
feet splayed, bones aching. He was full of Satra Riders,
the worms inside his body endlessly swimming and getting
bigger by the day. When they were ready – soon – they
would pour out of him. From his nostrils, from the corners
of his eyes, from his ears, from his belly button, his penis
and his anus, and from his mouth. And to those who
witnessed, he would seem to deflate, skin crinkling and
collapsing down into weaving furrows running the length
of his body. He would seem to instantly turn into an old
man. And then he would die.
    Visto was almost impatient for that. He hoped ribbers
would eat his body and so take in the eggs the Satra Riders
had left behind, so that they too would die. Better yet,
Fathers – but they weren't that stupid, he was sure – no,
they wouldn't touch him and that was too bad.
    The Snake was leaving behind Forest Stet, and the
wooden road gave way to a trader's track of dusty, rutted
dirt, wending out into the Elan. So, he would die on the
plain, and his spirit would pull away from the shrunken
thing that had been its body, and begin the long journey
back home. To find his sister. To find his mother.
    And already, his spirit was tired, so tired, of walking.
    At day's end, Badalle forced herself to climb an old Elan
longbarrow with its ancient tree at the far end – grey leaves
fluttering – from which she could turn and look back
along the road, eastward, as far as her eyes could retrace
the day's interminable journey. Beyond the mass of the
sprawled camp, she saw a wavy line of bodies stretching to
the horizon. This had been an especially bad day, too hot,
too dry, the lone waterhole a slough of foul, vermin-ridden
mud, filled with rotting insect carcasses that tasted like
dead fish.
    She stood, looking for a long time on the ribby length
of the Snake. Those that fell on the track had not been
pushed aside, simply trampled on or stepped over, and
so the road was now a road of flesh and bone, fluttering
threads of hair, and, she knew, staring eyes. The Snake of
Ribs. Chal Managa in the Elan tongue.
    She blew flies from her lips.
And voiced another poem.
    'On this morning
We saw a tree
With leaves of grey
And when we got closer
The leaves flew away
    At noon the nameless boy
With the eaten nose
Fell and did not move
And down came the leaves
To feed
    At dusk there was another tree
Grey fluttering leaves
Settling in for the night
Come the morning
They'll fly again'
    Ampelas Rooted, the Wastelands
    The machinery was coated in oily dust that gleamed in the
darkness as the faint glow of the lantern light slid across
it, conveying motion where none existed, the illusion of
silent slippage, as of reptilian scales that seemed, as ever,
cruelly appropriate. She was breathing hard as she hurried
down the narrow corridor, ducking every now and then to
avoid the lumpy black cables slung down from the ceiling.
Her nose and throat stung with the rank metal reek of the
close, motionless air. Surrounded in the exposed guts of
Root, she felt besieged by the unknowable, the illimitable
mystery of dire arcana. Yet, she had made these unlit,
abandoned passageways her favoured haunt, knowing full
well the host of self-recriminating motivations that had
guided her to such choices.
    The Root invited the lost, and Kalyth was indeed lost. It
was not that she could not find her way among the countless
twisting corridors, or through the