The Crippled God

to be commanding them either – the Matron commands. The Matron must command. If she sees too many of her children dying, she will withdraw. She has to! For the very survival of her kind!’
    ‘They are led by Gesler and Stormy, Banaschar.’
    ‘Gods below! Just how much faith have you placed in the efforts of two demoted marines?’
    She met his eyes unflinching. ‘All that I need to. Now, you have indulged your moment of doubt, I trust. It is time to leave.’
    He studied her for a moment longer, and then felt the tension draining from him. Managed a lopsided smile. ‘I am Demidrek to the Worm of Autumn, Adjunct. Perhaps she hears you through me. Perhaps, in the end, we can teach D’rek a lesson in faith.’
    ‘Better,’ she snapped, picking up the sword.
    They stepped outside.
    The three horses were waiting, two saddles as yet unfilled. Slouched in the third one … Banaschar looked up, nodded in greeting. ‘Captain.’
    ‘Priest,’ Fiddler replied.
    He and the Adjunct swiftly mounted up – the scrawny animals shifting beneath them – and then the three of them swung away. Rode out from the Malazan encampment on the grassy plain.
    Riding northwest.
    There had been few words on that journey. They rode through the night, alternating between canter and trot. The western horizon was lit on occasion with lurid lightning, the flashes stained red, but overhead the Jade Strangers commanded the night sky, bright enough to expunge the stars, and the rolling grasslands around them bore a hue of healthy green the day’s light would reveal as false. There had been no rain in this place for years, and the hoofs of their horses kicked up broken blades of grass like scythes.
    When they came in sight of a lone rise that dominated all the others, the Adjunct angled her horse towards it. The lesser hills they crossed as they drew closer all bore signs of ancient camps – boulders left in ragged rings to mark where the sides of tipis had been anchored down. A thousand paces to the northwest the land dropped down into a broad, shallow valley, and its far slope was marked by long curving stretches of rocks and boulders, forming lines, blinds and runs for herd beasts now long gone, as vanished as the hunters who had preyed upon them.
    Banaschar could feel the desolation of this place, like an itch under his skin, a crawling unease of mortality. It all passes. All our ways of doing things, seeing things, all these lost ways of living. And yet … could I step back into that age, could I stand unseen among these people, I would be no different – no different inside … gods, could I explain this, even to myself, I might someday make a claim to wisdom .
    Our worlds are so small. They only feel endless because our minds can gather thousands of them all at once. But if we stop moving, if we hold to one place, if we draw breath and look around … each one is the same. Barring a few details. Lost ages are neither more nor less profound than the one we live in right now. We think it’s all some kind of forward momentum, endless leaving behind and reaching towards. But the truth is, wherever we find ourselves – with all its shiny gifts – we do little more than walk in circles .
    The thought makes me want to weep .
    They drew rein at the base of the hill. The sides were uneven, with projections of rust-stained bedrock pushing up through the thin skin of earth, the stone cracked and fissured by untold centuries of frost and heat. Closer to the summit was a crowded chaos of yellow-whitedolomite boulders, their softer surfaces pecked and carved with otherworldly scenes and geometric patterns. Spikewood and some kind of prairie rose bushes, skeletal now and threatening with thorns, filled the spaces between the boulders.
    The Adjunct dismounted, drawing off her leather gloves. ‘Captain.’
    ‘Aye,’ he replied. ‘It will do.’
    When Fiddler slipped down from his horse, Banaschar followed suit.
    The Adjunct in the lead, they ascended the hillside. Now closer to the rotted outcrops, Banaschar saw bleached fragments of human bone trapped in cracks and crevasses, or heaped on ledges and in niches. On the narrow, winding tracks between the up-thrust bedrock, his boots crunched on beads made from polished nuts, and the ground was littered with the withered remnants of woven baskets.
    Reaching the summit, they saw that the dolomite boulders formed a rough ring, perhaps ten paces across, with the centre area more or less level.