Assail (Malazan Empire, #6)(115)

Then the stranded vessels and would-be fortune-hunters thinned. Those ships that couldn’t limp along any further had all pulled in or sunk by this point. Those that could continue did so, leaving their fellows behind. The old unspoken law of reaching out to take what one could and damning the rest to Hood’s cold embrace.

The raw ugly ruthlessness of it sickened Jute. What a waste! What a stupid urge to enslave one’s fortune to – the empty promise of unguarded riches to be picked up by anyone. Where was the merit in any such gathered power or riches? Merely because you were first to snatch it up? Could not the second person there simply kill you and take it for himself?

Best not to invest in such easily transferable value, Jute determined. His gaze fell to the blind face of his love and he rested a hand upon hers.

‘I feel your eyes on me,’ she murmured. ‘What’s on your mind, luv?’

‘I just realized that I’ve risked everything to reach a destination I don’t even want to be at.’

A secretive smile broadened Ieleen’s lips. ‘Glad to hear that, luv.’

Jute frowned. ‘But you didn’t object …’

‘That’s what journeys are for, my love. You have to take the path to learn where you want to be.’

‘The philosopher wife speaks.’

She gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘We mates sit and wait. And, if we’re lucky, our partners finally catch up to where we’ve been all the while.’

Jute crossed his arms. ‘Oh? Been a long wait, has it?’

‘Damnably long. But now that you’re here, maybe we can go home.’

‘Certainly, light of my life. We’ll just sell our goods at outrageously inflated prices, load up with successful fortune-hunters groaning beneath the weight of all their gold, and head home.’

‘We should just cut out the middle and turn round now.’

Jute laughed. ‘And what would the crew think of that?’

Her frosty orbs shifted as if to look ahead, and though he knew her to be blind, Jute couldn’t shake the feeling that her sight was penetrating all the distance to their goal. She sighed. ‘We’re sailing into a nest of pirates, thieves and murderers.’

Jute tried to shake his premonition of trouble. ‘Then it’s a good thing we have a mercenary army with us, isn’t it?’

She shook her head. ‘A last mission, Tyvar said. Have you not thought about that?’

Indeed, it hadn’t occurred to him. He waved it off, then remembered, and made a noncommittal noise. ‘Don’t you worry. We’ll raise anchor and ship out if we must, don’t doubt that.’

They sailed through the day and night. The Ragstopper and the Resolute kept pace, while the Supplicant held out in deeper water, far offshore. Jute wondered at Lady Orosenn’s strategy, but it was the listing Ragstopper that held his attention; the vessel was so low in the water, so sluggish and lumbering, it was a wonder that it still held its bows above the surface. The collection of rotted timbers that it had crumbled into seemed little more than a glorified raft.

Late on the second day, smoke hazed the air further up the coast ahead. A stink reached them, the commingled reek of human settlement: smoke, excrement, rot, and cooking. Jute had been long from it and it churned his stomach. They rounded a low headland still gripped in ice and there ahead lay a broad bay fronted by wide mud flats. An immense tent city swept in an arc all along the shore. Smoke rose from countless fires. What must be a hundred vessels lay pulled up on the flats, or anchored in deeper water out in the bay. The coast swept up from here in broad forested valleys and ridges that climbed to foothills obscured by hanging banners of fog. Above this vista reared the snow-capped shoulders of a range of mountains: the Salt range, according to sources he’d heard recounted.

Jute was astounded by the numbers of ships that had succeeded in the journey – yet this must be the barest fraction of the entire fleets of vessels that had originally set out. All testament to the driving power of greed and the lure of easy riches. He felt saddened by the spectacle though he himself was a merchant, a businessman; it struck him as a damning condemnation of humankind.

‘Which way?’ Lurjen asked from the tiller.

Jute shook himself from his reverie. He gestured ahead. ‘Make for one of the docks there near the centre.

‘Aye, aye.’

Lurjen chose one of a number of log docks that stood tall above the flats and extended out over the water. The Silver Dawn came alongside, ropes were thrown and secured to log bollards. His crew wrestled with a gangplank. Jute studied the jumbled mass of countless tents, the men and women coming and going, the crews cutting wood to repair vessels, build more docks, and raise buildings. He estimated the numbers here in the several thousands. A city. An instant city utterly without planning or organization, as far he could see. Tents lay like fields of mushrooms, all without logic or order. No straight thoroughfares existed, no streets or lanes; all was a chaotic mess. He was dismayed to see men and women squatting over latrine pits right next to open-air kitchens where the steam from boiling pots melded with the steam rising from the pits to waft over the entire mass of humanity.

A far worse reek rose from the flats where cadavers lay rotting, most having sloughed their flesh: an open-air graveyard where the dead were obviously simply thrown from the docks and shore. Hordes of ghost-crabs wandered from corpse to corpse like clouds of locusts, gorging themselves.