Dust of Dreams

bowed to him, and released herself.
     
    Onos T’oolan watched as Nom Kala fell in a gusting cloud. In his mind a figure was approaching, hands held out as if beseeching. He knew that harrowed face, that lone glittering eye. What could he say to this stranger he had once known? He too was a stranger, after all. Yes, they had once known each other.
But now look at us, both so intimate with dust.
    Nom Kala’s anguish returned to him. Her thoughts had bled with dread power—she was young. She was, he realized, what the Imass might have become, had the Ritual not taken them, had it not stolen their future.
A future of pathos. Sordid surrender. The loss of dignity, a slow, slow death.
    No, Toc the Younger. I give you nothing but silence. And its torrid roar.
    Will you hear? Will you listen?
    Any of you?
     
    She had dwelt like a parasite deep in its entrails. She had seen, all around her, the broken remnants of some long abandoned promise, the broken clutter, the spilled fluids. But there had been heat, and a pulsing presence as if the very stone was alive—she should have understood the significance of such things, but her mind had been wallowing in its own darkness, a lifeless place of pointless regrets.
    Standing not six paces from the two gold-skinned foreigners, she had turned and, like them, looked with wonder, disbelieving.
    Ampelas Rooted.
    Ampelas Uprooted.
The entire city, its massive, mountainous bulk, filled the northern sky. Its underside was a forest of twisted metal roots, from which drained rainbow rain as if even in pain it could bleed nothing but gifts. Yet, Kalyth could see its agony. It was canted to one side. It was surrounded by smokeand dust. Fissures rose from its base, like the broken knuckles of a god only moments from once again hammering the earth.
    She could feel . . . something, a bristling core of will knotted in breathless pain. The Matron’s? Could it be anyone else? Her blood flowed through the rock. Her lungs howled, winds shrieking between caverns. Her sweat glistened and ran like tears. She bled in a thousand places, bones splintering to vast, ever growing pressures.
    The Matron, yes, but . . . there was no mind left inside that nightmare of oozing flesh.
    Uprooted
, this long-dead thing.
Uprooted
, a thousand upon a thousand generations of belief, faith, the solid iron of once immutable laws.
    She defies every truth. She wills life into a corpse, and now it staggers across the sky.
    ‘A sky keep,’ said the one named Gesler. ‘Moon’s Spawn—’
    ‘But this one is bigger,’ said Stormy, clawing at his beard. ‘If Tayschrenn could see this—’
    ‘If Rake had been commanding one of these—’
    Stormy grunted. ‘Aye. He’d have flattened the High Mage like a cockroach under a thumb. And then he’d have done the same to the whole Hood-damned Malazan Empire.’
    ‘But look,’ said Gesler. ‘It’s in rough shape—not as ugly as Rake’s rock, but it looks like it could come down at any time.’
    Kalyth could now see the Furies marching beneath the Dragon Tower—
the sky keep, yes, that is well named.
Ve’Gath Soldiers in their thousands. K’ell Hunters well in advance of the legions and ranging out to the sides in looser formations. Behind the ranks of the Furies, drones struggled to pull enormous wagons groaning beneath towering loads.
    ‘Look at the big ones,’ Gesler said. ‘The heavies—gods below, one of those could rip a Kenyll’rah demon in half.’
    Kalyth spoke. ‘Mortal Sword, they are Ve’Gath, the soldiers of the K’Chain Che’Malle. No Matron has ever birthed so many. A hundred was deemed sufficient. Gunth’an Acyl has birthed more than fifteen thousand.’
    The man’s amber eyes fixed on her. ‘If Matrons could do that, why didn’t they? They could be ruling this world right now.’
    ‘There was terrible . . . pain.’ She hesitated, and then said. ‘Sanity was lost.’
    ‘Soldiers like those,’ Stormy muttered, ‘what ruler needs to be sane?’
    Kalyth grimaced. These two men were irreverent. They seemed to be fearless.
They are the ones. But nothing insisted I must like them, or even understand them. No, they frighten me as much as the K’Chain Che’Malle do.
‘She is dying.’
    Gesler rubbed at his face. ‘No heir?’
    ‘Yes. One waits.’ She pointed. ‘There, the two now drawing close. Gunth Mach, the One Daughter. Sag’Churok, her K’ell guardian.’ Then her breath caught as she saw the one trailing them,