A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 4

remaining
task on this earth was to oversee the annihilation
of the last Matron of the K'Chain Che'Malle. Was there
satisfaction in that? If so, it was an evil kind of satisfaction,
making its taste all the more alluring.
    Among her people, death arrived winging across the face
of the setting sun, a black, tattered omen low in the sky.
She would be that dread vision, that shred of the murdered
moon. Driven to the earth as all things were, eventually.
    This is all true.
See the bleakness in my eyes.
    Shi'gal Gu'Rull stood upon the very edge of Brow, the
night winds howling round his tall, lean form. Eldest
among the Shi'gal, the assassin had fought and defeated
seven other Shi'gal in his long service to Acyl. He had
survived sixty-one centuries of life, of growth, and was
twice the height of a full-grown K'ell Hunter, for unlike the
Hunters – who were flavoured with mortality's sudden end
at the close of ten centuries – the Shi'gal possessed no such
flaw in their making. They could, potentially, outlive the
Matron herself.
    Bred for cunning, Gu'Rull held no illusions regarding the
sanity of Mother Acyl. Her awkward assumption of godly
structures of faith ill-fitted both her and all the K'Chain
Che'Malle. The matron sought human worshippers,
human servants, but humans were too frail, too weak to be
of any real value. The woman Kalyth was proof enough of
that, despite the flavour of percipience Acyl had given her
– a percipience that should have delivered certitude and
strength, yet had been twisted by a weak mind into new
instruments of self-recrimination and self-pity.
    That flavour would fade in the course of the Seeking,
as Kalyth's swift blood ever thinned Acyl's gift, with no
daily replenishment possible. The Destriant would revert
to her innate intelligence, and that was a meagre one by
any standard. She was already useless, as far as Gu'Rull was
concerned. And upon this meaningless quest, she would
become a burden, a liability.
    Better to kill her as soon as possible, but alas, Mother
Acyl's command permitted no such flexibility. The
Destriant must choose a Mortal Sword and a Shield Anvil
from among her own kind.
    Sag Churok had recounted the failure of their first selection.
The mass of flaws that had been their chosen one:
Redmask of the Awl. Gu'Rull did not believe the Destriant
would fare any better. Humans may well have thrived in
the world beyond, but they did so as would feral orthen,
simply by virtue of profligate breeding. They possessed no
other talents.
    The Shi'gal lifted his foreshortened snout and opened
his nostril slits to scent the chill night air. The wind came
from the east and, as usual, it stank of death.
    Gu'Rull had plundered the pathetic memories of the
Destriant, and therefore knew that no salvation would be
found to the east, on the plains known as the Elan. Sag
Churok and Gunth Mach had set out westward, into the
Awl'dan, and there too they found only failure. The north
was a forbidding, lifeless realm of ice, tortured seas and
bitter cold.
    Thus, they must journey south.
    The Shi'gal had not ventured outside Ampelas Rooted
in eight centuries. In that short span of time, it was likely
that little had changed in the region known to humans as
the Wastelands. Nonetheless, some advance scouting was
tactically sound.
    With this in mind, Gu'Rull unfolded his month-old
wings, spreading the elongated feather-scales so that they
could flatten and fill out under the pressure of the wind.
    And then the assassin dropped over the sheer edge of
Brow, wings snapping out to their fullest extent, and there
arose the song of flight, a low, moaning whistle that was,
for the Shi'gal, the music of freedom.
    Leaving Ampelas Rooted . . . it had been too long since
Gu'Rull felt this . . . this exhilaration.
    The two new eyes beneath the lines of his jaw now
opened for the first time, and the compounded vision
– of the sky ahead and the ground below – momentarily
confused the assassin, but after a time Gu'Rull was able to
enforce the necessary separation, so that the vistas found
their proper relationship to one another, creating a vast
panorama of the world beyond.
    Acyl's new flavours were ambitious, indeed, brilliant.
Was such creativity implicit in madness? Perhaps.
    Did that possibility engender hope in Gu'Rull? No.
Hope was not possible.
    The assassin soared through the night, high above a
blasted, virtually lifeless landscape. Like a shred of the
murdered moon.
    The Wastelands
    He was not